Whatever Happened to Conciseness?
How many times have you had to click off of a video or stop reading an article because the person who created never seems to want to get to the point? This happens to me every day, multiple times a day. Nobody seems to know how to edit their material down to the most digestible form possible. Instead, they want to ramble endlessly about stuff that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. I find myself mentally rewriting and cutting chunks out of their script in the hopes to retain the useful information and disregard the fluff.
I don’t like to edit my work in any way, shape, or form. I find that when you spend too much time on a piece, it starts to become distorted and unusable. I get this for long form publications. When you’re breezing through a lengthy manuscript, you will reach a point where you don’t know where you came from or where you’re going. Bringing an editor in who understands the way you think can do a great deal of good as long as they understand how you think. Someone who doesn’t know you or your material is bound to make changes that transform your voice into theirs.
At the same time, not editing your work does not mean that you should go with the first thing that comes to your mind. Read over everything that you have put on the page and try as hard as you can to put yourself in the shoes of their audience. Delete anything and everything that might lose their attention. Work on saying what you want to say in the fewest words possible. Don’t aim for a word count and extend your prose just to meet it. If you need to shoot for a specific word count, insert useful information or expound on what you’ve already written.
In the case of videos, I blame YouTube and the algorithm they have in place. Putting more of an emphasis on watch time causes creators to extend what would otherwise be a short video in the hopes of getting people to watch a little bit longer. Some creators are concise and do not care if their videos are short. Others put out much longer videos that could be cut down a great deal. I can’t tell you how many creators I’ve abandoned because the pursuit of watch time went to their head.
I want to return to a time where people worked on what they planned to say or present in their written pieces. I want to be able to click on an article or video and know that it’s not overloaded with irrelevant nonsense. I believe that this idea is really impractical in an era where everyone can publish anything with the click of a button. It’s the job of the audience to reject bloated creations in favor of their polished counterparts. Then and only then will we see a change for the better.
